Anthropic has changed the two top individual plans for Claude, its AI assistant. On Friday, Oct. 30, it renamed Max 5x to Max and Max 20x to Ultra, and said it is removing the five-hour usage limit for verified Ultra accounts, starting that day with most existing subscribers. Max still costs $100 a month and Ultra $200, and current subscribers don't need to do anything.
Paid Claude plans have had two kinds of limits. A session limit caps how much a person can use Claude in five hours, counted from the first message, and a weekly limit caps the total. Someone deep in a long job, such as a big coding task in Claude Code, could use up the five-hour allowance and then have to wait for it to reset, move to a bigger plan or pay for extra use. Use on the Claude website, the desktop app and Claude Code all counts toward the same limits.
A verified Ultra account now has no five-hour limit, just weekly limits: one across all models, which Anthropic says is 10 times the weekly use of its $20 Pro plan, and a separate one for Fable, Anthropic's top model. Max keeps both kinds of limit, at five times Pro's use every five hours and every week. Anthropic says weekly limits remain unchanged.
Not every Ultra account gets the change at once. Anthropic says it verifies accounts automatically, using factors like account and payment history, to prevent fraud and abuse, and that newer accounts keep a temporary limit until they are verified. Anthropic has not said how long that takes. Verifying a phone number at checkout does not remove the limit. Subscribers will get an email when it is lifted, and the usage page in Claude's settings no longer shows a current session bar for a verified account.
Anthropic's help pages say it may limit use in other ways, such as monthly caps or limits on certain models and features, to manage capacity, and that it does not guarantee uninterrupted service.